Posted
by
kdawsonon Friday July 10, 2009 @10:15AM
from the lotus-123-baby dept.

tunersedge writes "Yesterday I dug out of my parents' basement a PC they had bought brand new in 1984: Epson Equity I personal computer; 512K RAM; 82-key keyboard; 2 (count 'em!, 2) 5.25" floppy disk drives; 13' RGB monitor (with contrast/brightness knobs); handy on/off switch; healthy 25-year-old yellowed plastic; absolutely no software. (My mom ran a pre-school, and they used it to keep records and payroll. I cut my programming teeth on this thing. GW-Basic was my friend. Kings Quest screens took 2 minutes to load when you walked into a new one.) When I resurrected this machine I pulled the case off, dusted out a little, and plugged it in. It actually fired up! I'm stoked, except the disks we had are missing. What I'm looking to do is either buy some old working disks with whatever I can find (MS-DOS 3.22, GW-Basic, whatever), or try and recreate some using a USB-based floppy drive and some modern software. Has anyone tried to resurrect a PC this old before?"

Most of the time, when the complexity is hidden in favor of a simplified interface on the top that's supposed to intelligently "just work", I find that there's always at least one case that I need that thee implementer didn't think of. I'm fine with having a simplified interface on top, just as long as there's a quick way to rip off the facade and get down to the gears and engine grease if I need or want to.

eBay is fine for obtaining a supply of disks, but not necessarily so fine for finding software. However, see the FreeDOS site [freedos.org] for a likely operating system. That software should allow you to connect a CD-ROM drive (again eBay can be your friend), after which you should be able to find all sorts of DOS software you can run (eBay, again!).

You're right. It's a 4.77 8088 with 8 bit ISA slots. Now I've seen 8 bit IDE host adapters, but they were odd-ball in 1990, let alone now. As for whether or not it would "take" a CD ROM driver, of course it would. DOS is the same on 8088's and 286's. You would just need an 8 bit host adapter to connect it to. That would most likely be SCSI.

I remember my first CD ROM with a proprietary 8 bit SCSI adapter from the DAK catalog. Expensive and slow, but it worked!

I think the Epson Equity was the one that had a typo in the BIOS when you inserted a floppy disk. The typo was in the word disk, and exhorted the user to insert a system dick when they booted with a non-boot floppy.

Double density is what these drives used, and high density are easier to find. Is that what you meant?

Single density disks weren't that commonly used. The only reasonably common system I can think of that used them was the Atari 8-bit machines, and even then only if you had the original 810 5.25" disk drive. The later 1050 used double density disks (but could read and write single density disks with a lower capacity).

I've used a couple models of Epson Equity. The custom DOS version 3.2 on the XT model (Equity I) is easy to find online, but there's really nothing special about it. The AT model (Equity III) had DOS 4.01 and it was a generic version.

MS-DOS 3.3 is probably the easiest to find and is the ideal version for an XT-class system. A full 3.3 will have GW-BASIC on disk 2.

Double density (AKA "standard density" or 360K) cannot reliably be formatted for high density (1.2M) use, or vice versa, because the coercivity of the media is significantly different.

IBM-compatible PCs have never used single density as a standard disk format, and many IBM-compatible PCs can't actually deal with single density, though some can. The first disk drives shipped on PCs were single sided, though IBM switched to double sided fairly early on. The format progression for media on the PC, AT, PS/2, and compatibles was:

"I've said some stupid things and some wrong things, but not that. No one involved in computers would ever say that a certain amount of memory is enough for all time... I keep bumping into that silly quotation attributed to me that says 640K of memory is enough. There's never a citation; the quotation just floats like a rumor, repeated again and again." http://groups.google.com/group/alt.folklore.computers/msg/99ce4b0555bf35f4?pli=1 [google.com]

And what Rumsfeld said about "known unknowns" was logical (albeit paraphrased in a place where the original quote would have been better.)

And Al Gore didn't claim to have "invented" the internet; he said he "took the initative in creating the internet", which given how you would expect a Congreeman to take initative (recognizing a good program, giving it attention and money) is true.

And Sarah Palin's speech was actually coherent, not beautiful but coherent, if you read it.

And Quayle's spelling of potato isn't the most common, but is technically a valid alternative. (Although the potato incident was dumb for other reasons.)

People who you dislike rarely say the dumb things you think they did, as you'll address a quote out of context (or misrepresentation of that quote) from someone you like, but not from someone you don't. You're more than happy to assume people you don't like are retarded.

I know you can actually find the audio of this out on the Internet. I have a copy and I think the whole thing (speech) is about an hour long. Anyway, here's the quote he said.

I have to say that in 1981, making those decisions, I felt like I was providing enough freedom for 10 years. That is, a move from 64k to 640k felt like something that would last a great deal of time. Well, it didnt - it took about only 6 years before people started to see that as a real problem.

No, it isn't. Are you trolling, or just never botherd to listen to it?
If you had listened to it, you 'd have to admit HE DOES NOT say "640 k should be enough for anyone".

The only part you could be referring to is:

So that's a 1 MB address space. And in that original design I took the upper 340k and decided that a certain amount should be for video memory, a certain amount for the ROM and I/O, and that left 640k for general purpose memory. And that leads to today's situation where people talk about the 640k memory barrier; the limit of how much memory you can put to these machines. I have to say that in 1981, making those decisions, I felt like I was providing enough freedom for 10 years. That is, a move from 64k to 640k felt like something that would last a great deal of time. Well, it didn't - it took about only 6 years before people started to see that as a real problem.

Which if YOU READ THE FUCKING THING, is him speaking in 1989, years after the design was set (1980 or 81), saying that 640k was certainly not enough.

You found a paragraph where Bill Gates mentions "640 k". Unfortunately, it's not remotely close to the "quote".

Do a Usenet search on the phrase. Though usually dated 1981 or thereabouts, the first time it appears on the record is August 1992 (in a Mac newsgroup). Never has anyone cited the circumstances, the place and exact date, he's suposed to have said this.

-----

Quite so. The actual remark was made by Steve Jobs to Steve Wozniak regarding building a card to expand the Apple II's memory from the max possible on the motherboard of 48K to a full 64K (the "language card"). Jobs' statement "Who would ever want more than 48K?" has been misattributed and misquoted for years, as have many statements made by some that sound so much better coming from someone else. The answer was, almost everybody. When the IIe came out it had 64K on the board and could accept a second 64K card. The IIc came with two full 64K banks installed.

Jobs was frequently at odds with Wozniak over technical issues. Jobs wanted no more than 2 slots in the Apple II. Woz wanted 8 and put them in. Jobs argued against color. Woz put it in, first in blocky lo-res, then in an awesome hack that resulted in 16 color (including two blacks and two whites) hi-res. Other examples exist, but these two illustrate Jobs' penchant for one-upsmanship: When he built the first Mac, it had no color and no slots.

Jobs' quote was in many MOTD files during the late 70's and early 80's, until the misattributed Gates quote started replacing it.

(The part in your post starts at around 22 minutes in case anyone else is reading this and doesn't want to sit through the whole 1.5 hours.)

I've been wanting one of these for years... they need to make one that's compatible with all systems, not just IBM Compatible. I wonder if one of the numerous C64 floppy adapters (that uses parallel) would let you write to IBM format.

I actually know the machine you're talking about - except I had a HDD. I know for a fact the thing will run MS-DOS 5.0.x

Heh. I had the same Equity I also, but since my dad was something of a computer geek himself, he sprang for a 20MB hardcard for it. At the time, 20MB seemed like it would be enough space to last me the rest of my life:/

It's "feign indignation at the high quality of life of the previous poster" + "state your childhood desires to have such luxury" + "state how much worse you had it" so that the next poster can follow up. Get with the program!

I know that may be a joke to you but call up Epson or submit a ticket [epson.com] explaining to them your situation. Who knows? Maybe they have a storeroom with old floppies lying around so you can get the original software back? I imagine those disks wore out all the time. Just ask them if they have any of the original software for that model lying around. That would be amazing support if they did.

They do host the manual [epson.com] that indicates you have a parallel port and a RS-232C serial port to play with and also something that looks like expansion slots designed for peripherals. Good luck and have fun!

I used to do this all the time with game companies back in the nineties. Often times they'd send me free copies of their C-64 programs and whatnot. It is absolutely worth a shot even though nowadays the operator on the phone is probably not going to even understand your request and/or believe that such a product ever existed.

Just a thought - unless I'm mistaken, the floppy cable that plugs into a 3.5" drive also fits in a 5.25" drive - and the power connector for regular PATA hard drives also fits the 5.25" floppy drive. If that is still the case, all he needs to do is put his old 5.25" drive next to a new computer, plug in the cables and fire it up. Create a boot floppy using the Windows 95 'create a boot floppy' utility or however you make boot floppys now (I have a.img file of that boot floppy I use to create boot CDs, so it's been a while since I made a boot floppy - format a:/s maybe?)

Put the 5.25" drive and your new boot floppy back in and Voila! you are all set.

Right. However, creating 360k disks in a 1.2MB drive may not be easily readable by an actual 360k drive due to the different read/write head sizes between the two. The smaller head on the 1.2 doesn't have a problem with the wider tracks of the 360k, but the other way around is know to cause issues.

Replace the 5.25" floppy disk drives with 3 1/2 inch and download DOS from some site. As to what you can run on it, you may have better luck with one of the smaller Linux distros, like Damn Small Linux [damnsmalllinux.org]

Problem is Linux runs on 386+. You might be able to run something like ucLinux on 286, but i doubt you'll be able to run anything like Linux on a 8088/8086/80186. With 512k RAM you won't be able to boot any kernel, no matter how old.

Getting these things up and running is no surprise to me. It seems that they used quality stuff in them days. I have loads of these oldies that haven't been booted for 10+ years and upon plugging them in they start off as if nothing ever happened. Drives with a ST-506 interface in particular seem to be of an indistructible kind of quality-make.
Feel free to contact me for disks, or as stated; check eBay of contact Bruce Damer of the DigiBarn [http://www.digibarn.com/].

Getting these things up and running is no surprise to me. It seems that they used quality stuff in them days. I have loads of these oldies that haven't been booted for 10+ years and upon plugging them in they start off as if nothing ever happened. Drives with a ST-506 interface in particular seem to be of an indistructible kind of quality-make.
Feel free to contact me for disks, or as stated; check eBay of contact Bruce Damer of the DigiBarn [http://www.digibarn.com/].

Is it really quality, or is it more like that engineering principle that the more complex a thing is, the more likely it is to break down? Because today's machines are one hell of a lot more complex...

Nah, it's a typical lifecycle for expensive products that become commodities. When that PC was new, it probably cost upwards of $5,000 in 1984 dollars. Many parts were Made In USA instead of by some faceless penny-scraping OEM in Taiwan. Heck, people used to actually send hard drives in for repair instead of just RMA'ing them and getting a new one. You'll see this in other products too...automobiles, washing machines, sewing machines, etc.

Like the others are saying, when a thing is going to cost $4000, an extra $200 for quality construction is a worthwhile investment. When the whole thing costs $200, not so much. Keyboards are really emblematic of this - they used to be a selling point for computers, while now people think it's strange if you'll pay $70 for a Unicomp keyboard. (I've never understood this idea; why would you cheap out on mouse and keyboard when they're the primary interface with the computer? You use them ALL THE TIME.)

Nice things to do:- add extra ram by using an ISA memory expansion card (up to 2MB !!!), running windows 3.0 would then be possible !- 200mb+ IDE/MFM drive (the latter where mostly smaller though and a bit hard to get)- ISA VGA card- ISA Soundblaster- ISA ethernetcard- run Arachne and surf the WEB !!!!!!!!!!!!, heheh yes you can this baby on slashdot:)- a lot more upgrade options, FPU etc.. etc..

I'm assuming this is either an 8088 or 8086 chip. Many people learned embedded programming on these chips, and there are probably millions of them in use in embedded systems around the world.

This sounds like a great opportunity to program your own embedded OS for the machine. Get a PROM burner and your favorite compatible compiler and have some fun! You're a programmer, and you cut your teeth on this PC. Learn another aspect of programming with it.

FreeDOS has been discussed here before, at length. It should work on your machine well enough to get you started. There are a lot of resources available related the FreeDOS efforts; so, you may be able to find a lot of what you are looking for.

The USB drives likely won't work with this old machine -- but you now that are I'm assuming you're talking about creating the floppies. I haven't seen a 5 1/4" external for some time... You may need to put a 3 1/2" disk into the old machine initially.

I guess it must be the difference between ages that causes someone to think that a cruddy DOS machine is actually something worth bringing back up.

Me, I cut my teeth on Radio Shack Model 4 machines, quickly discovering how much more software I could run once I got Montezuma CP/M running on it and downloading public domain software from the local (multi-user) CP/M bulletin board system.

Once the actual PC came along, I think just about anyone who had run a CP/M system saw it for what it was: a crappy copy that took none of the good from CP/M and just about all of the bad, running on a machine that supported a bit more RAM (not 640K yet, RAM was way too expensive) and a slightly faster processor.

I'm sure users of any of several pre-PC architectures would feel the same way - that the PC came along and the party stopped, kind of like that kid everybody hated at school showing up to a (previously fun) private party with a few of his friends.

What an awesome find! You can actually download all the software you'd ever want for the system here - http://www.vetusware.com/ [vetusware.com] - which is a website with hundreds of abandoned software titles for download free. They do have various versions of MS-DOS, which I'd suggest MS-DOS 5.0 or higher because I still have nightmares of edlin *cringe*. They do have MS-DOS 6.22 for download along with GWBasic, QBasic, Borland C++ for DOS, etc for development. I assume since you said the system is from 1984 that's it's an 8086 or 8088 which rules out Windows 3.x.

After years of using TRS-80 systems I moved to an 8088 XT clone in 1990 running MS-DOS 3.3, and as you that's where I really started learning to code with GWBasic. About 6 years ago I had some stuff in my closet shift one evening and that old system fell from the top shelf to the floor never to boot again. I wish I still had it, but a few years ago I did pull out an old 486SX system I picked up used in college (around 1996) and played with some of these old DOS languages and games.

Have fun though... so many people cast away these old systems as boat anchors, but they're awesome to work with if you have some patience.

You need to upgrade the RAM to 640 KB. Generally Radio Shack has some SIPPs you can add to the motherboard to add the last 128 KB.

You will need to find a Double density 3.5 floppy drive with a Card edge adaptor. This will allow you to use double density 3.5 floppies in the computer. (High Density will not work.)

You can network this be getting an 8-bit NIC that has a BNC and AUI port, then adding an AUI to UTP tranciever, but you can't use DHCP with it. The WATTCP stack for Dos will require a static IP.

If the video card is in an ISA slot, (and some times even it it isn't.) get a 16 bit ISA Trident VGA Card. This will give you VGA, EGA and CGA support. You can then plug the Computer into a standard monitor.

At work we have PC's much older than that, running manufacturing equipment. If any of them break down, I have a whole room full of old PC's that I could simply search for parts. Eventually we'll run out of parts (the equipment need ISA bus to operate), but at this rate, we're good for another 25 years or so.

http://www.vintagecomputing.com/forum/ [vintagecomputing.com]
These guys have a lot of experience with knowing where old stuff is today and keeping stuff like that working.
One of thousands of places to check out online.

In short: using a second machine (In my case, running Win98) and a homebrew serial cable, configure the machine to be revived to treat serial port input as keyboard input, then keyboard input direct into memory (like a DEBUG prompt) - If you can do that then the rest of the procedure might actually work with compatible software.

The support machine "types" the software directly into the host machine's memory and executes it. In the link above, you start with a ProDOS image which then gets written to disk so you can boot the machine normally.=Smidge=

This looks like a more or less standard boring old IBM PC compatible computer. There are truckloads of great old DOS programs floating around out there if you look around (although sadly most people only feel inclined to preserve games, not utilities and such)

Probably the easiest thing to do is connect a 360k drive to a somewhat more "modern" networked computer that has an internal floppy disk controller, and write disk images or files directly to it. One hint though, do not write 360k floppies with a 1.2mb 5.25" drive, they usually won't work due to differences in the size of the magnetic track written. If you need 5.25 floppy disks, you can usually find them on eBay - heck there are still 8" disks and punch cards floating around!

That system might be able to run up to MS/PC DOS 6.22 or perhaps even FreeDOS, but if there is no hard drive you probably would be best served with DOS 2.x or 3.x, they take up less disk space and memory.

There are various other OSes for 8088/8086 IBM PC compatibles (CP/M 86, and Xenix come to mind) as well as GUI shells (Visi-On, GEM, GEOS, and Windows 1.0 through 3.0) but most of the useful stuff for that class of machine is for plain old DOS.

If you are looking to add hardware, there is also plenty of old ISA stuff floating around on eBay. You might be able to add a 720k 3.5" floppy drive (check the physical bay size and connector compatibility) or a 1.4mb drive using an ISA controller card with a BIOS. 8-bit MFM/RLL hard drives and controllers, I'm sure I have even seen 8-bit IDE controllers before. There are ISA VGA cards that will work in 8 bit ISA systems (often they look like 16-bit cards but will still fit and operate in an 8-bit slot)

Anyway, lots of options but not as unique as TI-99/4a, Apple II, TRS-80 or such.

If you can get to a DOS prompt don't forget about the old trusty program called laplink. You can transfer files via serial or parallel port and you only need to have the laplink program on the one computer to get started but you gotta have da DOS first.

P.S. You gotta get a hard drive... you'll go mad with floppies very quickly.. remember 512MB is the limit for IDE without using the umm overlay ummm I've forgot what it was called... o well nothing of value was lost...

Unless the system has some funky ROM (like Tandy used that locked in a specific OS) there's no reason not to use a modern DOS. I still have a working XT and 286, and they both run M$DOS 6.00 -- it's MUCH faster than the older versions and a lot more capable, and is extremely stable (my very busy 286 routinely ran for up to *two years* between reboots). M$DOS7 from Win9x is the same as M$DOS6 but adds FAT32 support, and would work just as well. I presume one of the free DOS replacements, like FreeDOS, would also work.

The standard MSCDEX and Mouse drivers (v8.20 is best) should also work. You can get USB-to-some-other-port gadgets -- try cablenbits.com or tekgems.com, both are reliable vendors and carry all manner of oddball connectors and adapters.

I think they have been going for "funny", as in First Power-On Self Test.

But I agree with your "wtf is the point?", I can understand an older Amiga/Pentium system, 50/75/100MHz etc, they can actually do something, play media, file storage, work as an advanced router, etc or be "fun" enough for a kids (like 5-8 year old) PC.

The only possible reason is personal nostalgia. I can understand resurrecting computers that meant something significant in the history of computing like an original Apple II, or a TRS-80 or something of that nature. However, the machine he's talking about is not particularly historically interesting other than in his own personal life. So he can resurrect it for his own personal nostalgia, that's fine, but he shouldn't expect anyone to be impressed if he wants to show it to people later on or anything.

Actually trying to use the machine is not likely to make him happy, either. When I've messed around with older nostalgic machines from my childhood, it was cool for the first 10 minutes until the nostalgia wore off and I started to see how painfully slow and primitive they are. These things were great in their time, but they don't age well.

Since the machine is so generic and non-interesting, he may have a harder time finding any sort of enthusiast group for it, but the Internet is vast, so who knows what he could find if he spent enough time digging.

Hm. I've got an Equity I and I+ (with HD!). Maybe we should start a group...

Much like you said, I've got collections of old systems myself, and while some are significant in a universal way - an Osborne portable, for example - most are only significant to me.

The Equity I+ has actually seen some use, along with a Tandy almost-PC-compatible that my kids used to play Wheel of Fortune on a couple years ago. While they're nothing special, they are the oldest PC systems I have in working order, and I never had mu

This would be an incredible teaching aid. Students could be shown (not just told) how technology has advanced over 25 years. Real, side-by-side comparisons could be demonstrated using simple programs designed to run on both the new and old systems (first-hand demonstration of backwards compatibility, performance comparisons, etc). This could be an excellent system to teach the importance of efficiency in programming.

When my son is old enough to have an actual computer, I plan on giving him a system that has limited capabilities so I can teach him on a system that doesn't provide built-in distractions (I'll probably pick something newer than 25 years though). Of course, I'll teach him BASIC first, then maybe COBOL and some other simple languages before introducing him to modern languages and objects.

I had on old 386sx (didn't belong to me originally). I decided to try to make something out of it. I maxed out the ram, which meant buying VERY expensive cache chips (total cost >$80). At the end of the day, I had a very nice, very slow machine. The Oak video on it could do 800x600 at 256 colors, but that was all. Granted, for that time period, it was typical, but not something I would have purchased.

Given that people will pretty much give you their old P4 boxes nowadays, I don't think I'll ever go through this exercise again (I still have the machine btw).

I've been down this road many times before, myself...

I guess my favorite instance of this was an Everex 386-25 that I got in the mid 90s and used to play games from the early 90s. The thing had been stripped of its cache memory so I had to replace that - the fun thing about the machine was it had an 8-character alphanumeric display on the front of the machine... A little research and I found out how to write text to it.

It was fun but after a while it just starts to seem like a huge waste of time, money, a